We’re happy to announce the GA of Transactional Replication for Azure SQL Managed Instance! Transactional Replication has been supported in preview for a while, and during that time we had many happy customers that have used it successfully. Of course, this is a very popular and widely adopted feature of SQL Server, and we know that many of you eagerly waited to see this GA.
Transactional Replication is a powerful, versatile, and flexible technology that you can use to replicate a set of data from source to destination database. Source database can be hosted on SQL Server or Azure SQL Managed Instance, while destination can be on SQL Server, Azure SQL Managed Instance or Azure SQL Database.
You can use this technology to either keep a set of data in sync across remote databases, or to migrate data from SQL Server to managed instance or vice versa, from managed instance to SQL Server.
With this release, transactional replication, bi-directional transactional replication, and snapshot replication are supported on managed instances.
To use Transactional Replication in mixed environments, for example, between SQL Server that’s hosted on-premises and Azure SQL Managed Instance, you need to establish network connectivity between environments. Azure SQL Managed Instance is always deployed in a dedicated subnet of Azure VNet, and network connectivity towards that subnet can be created with point-to-site-VPN or Azure ExpressRoute. Here’s a great step by step guide for point-to-site-VPN setup.
If you want to use Transactional Replication in Azure environment only, between SQL Managed Instance, SQL Database and SQL VMs, network setup is simplified, as you can rely on Azure VNet peering, which can be easily configured from Azure Portal.
Finally, here's a short video that explains the functionality and shows a demo!
P.S. To learn more about many other managed instance announcements happening now, see this blog post.
